The Front-Runner Fallacy

Early presidential polls have tended to be wildly off-target. There’s no reason to think this time is different.

- David Greenberg

In November 1975 , one year before the obscure Georgia governor Jimmy Carter was elected president, the field of Democratic presidential aspirants was in chaos. According to the polls, voters’ top choices were Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts (23 percent), Governor George Wallace of Alabama (19 percent), and former Vice President Hubert Humphrey (17 percent). Unfortunately, only one of these men—a widely reviled racist—was actually running. To be sure, there was a grass-roots favorite expected to vault into contention by winning the Iowa caucuses, but it wasn’t Carter. It was Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana. Carter was netting low single digits. Newsweek explained that he could become viable “only in the long-odds event that [he] can stop George Wallace” and get the southern vote.

Four years later, Carter was, of course, president. And the late-1979 polling data strongly suggested that he would be dethroned—by Ted Kennedy. The great liberal hope for Democrats despairing of Carter’s incompetence, Kennedy had been scoring 60 percent in matchups against the incumbent earlier in the season. In the late fall he was still favored by Democratic majorities. One New York Times survey found black voters choosing Kennedy over Carter 53 to 15 percent, conservative Democrats favoring him 58 to 22 percent, and even southerners backing him 44 to 29 percent. But in the end, Kennedy triumphed in only 10 states, mostly in the Northeast.